Week 5: TIE (Storms)

Adding Banter

We started by reviewing the start that we created last week and we went through each bit carefully and made sure that we hadn't missed anything. We also tried to make sure that the energy was high for the transformation of us into boys so that we could get the jokey atmosphere which we think will allow the audience to know that we are open to them talking to us and to show that we are able to be a listening ear to them further in the performance if they need us to be. We always have the idea of what the client wants in the back of our minds and we were saying that our opening could be seen as being inconsiderate as we are making fun and stereotyping boys and the company Storms is reflecting a very personal topic surrounding suicide. But on the other hand, we have all done research that shows that boys/men are more likely to open up and talk about their feelings if there is a more relaxed and jokey atmosphere. I think that this is what we are trying to achieve with our start as we are setting the scene/atmosphere so the audience are on our side and then as we address the idea of suicide we are then going to see if the boys will understand the ways that they communicate or, opposingly, the ways that they do not communicate.

We then moved onto a discussion about the percentage of a performance that is dedicated to the audience and what percentage is dedicated to your fellow actors on stage.
For a real performance, we said that 85% of your acting would be to the people on stage and 15% would be to the audience because if it were a realistic play, you would want to be immersed in the lines and the story line and you want your audience to believe that you are feeling the way that you say you are. The 15% that goes towards the audience includes things like: not turning your back, keeping your volume high, facing a certain way so the audience can see your facial expressions or to hid the mechanisms of a lift.
Whereas when you're doing Theatre In Education the percentages change a little: 40% performance to the people onstage and 60% to the audience. This is due to the piece being for educational purposes so we need to acknowledge the audience to check if they are interested and understand what we are trying to portray.

We then wanted to add a little bit more onto the piece and so we decided to explore the things that boys focus on and we made scenes about the two emotions that we know are men’s focal emotions: Anger and Erotic. We made two scenes referring to each of them and incorporated in them into the scene after the chair stacking.

to expand on the word “banter” as this is what modern teenagers refer to their way of communicating and so we thought of subjects that boys might fine hard to speak about and so would create banter about as their way of communicating we decided that we would do: parents divorcing, failing exams and being broken up with. We referenced these along with the lines from our presenter “Noun - Banter, Verb - to banter and adjective - banterous.” With each different word group, a different scene was created. First of all was “Exam Banter” (https://youtu.be/_-DADSdvNS0) then it was mine and Hannah’s scene about "Divorce Banter" (https://youtu.be/eqE0w_OObcM) and then lastly "Breakup Banter" (https://youtu.be/mJ2vDaIn5OU)

I think that one of the best parts about our scene is the speed of the lines and especially the dialogue at the start when the boy refers to his problems as “nothing” and the other boy doesn’t delve any deeper in the subject instead he moves it onto something more comical as we found that men have a different way of dealing with conversation and have different aims. At this point, we thought that the boys wanted to avoid talking about their feelings and so they would avoid the subject causing them to move onto the next emotion that they naturally go to which is talking about girls/ something of an erotic nature, hence the “fit birds” I think that we need to work on the staging a little more so that when I ge the idea of her dad “banging a fit bird” then I can make it more obvious to the audience and get them involved.

Week 4: Director's Challenge

Before Wednesday's lesson, me and Alexis, my fellow director, had a discussion about the activity that we were going to do for our carousel. We wanted something that we introduce our play but not give too much away because we want the people who will be in our actual cast to be immersed in our play once the actual rehearsals start. We also wanted to have something that would sparks some people's imaginations and see who would be interested in doing our play.

In the back of the script there is a social experiment that Tim Etchells did with a group of 6 people, where he had a line of 6 chairs in the middle of the room and timed 1 minute and the cast were allowed to move around the space and do whatever they wanted and then in the last 10 seconds, Etchell's would count down and the cast had those 10 seconds to decide whether they wanted to stand in front of a chair or sit on a chair. He found that if half the people in the room stood up then the rest of the group would feel the instinctive to stand up as well but he also noticed that majority of the times he did it only 2 people stood up which meant that everybody else was sat down. If the people thought that they needed to stand up, then they were more concerned about those around them and what they were doing instead of concentrating on what they were doing and their own presence on stage. To add to this, we thought that we would write down missions on pieces of paper and give them out, adding more each round and this would also add to be another distract for the people and those who knew that someone had a mission were paying attention and trying to look for them but those who didn't know were the ones who were focused on themselves. We thought that this could link to some other practitioners like Stanislavski and his units and objectives as we could tell who was concentrating on their task and we could see who had a plan of what they were going to do to achieve that. We thought that we could even incorporate that idea of missions into our performance.

We then compared Brecht and Etchells as there are some things that are similar between these two practitioners and we wanted to make sure that we defined the differences between them. Brecht had characters but didn't want the audience to connect with them (also know as the "V" effect) whereas Etchells doesn't have any characters at all so there is no chance that the audience could relate/connect with a character onstage. They both, however, have characteristics that are shown so that the people onstage are recognisable as people.

This led me to researching one of Forced Entertainments newer pieces called "The Last Adventures" which is a collaboration with a Lebanese sound artists called Tarek Atoui. It mixes text, movement and images with electronic sound. "There is a rough, playful and unfinished feel to the aesthetic." This was a quote that Etchells said about his piece and this was something that we wanted to highlight in our play and I think that that should be the focal point of our play, the fact that nothing actually happens physically its centered around what happens mentally and the thought process that the audience goes through.

Other quotes that Etchells said:

"Props and costume are home made" - we can highlight this by the cast wearing their own clothes in our piece and it would also help accentuate the fact that they are being themselves on stage.
"The work made is always a kind of conversation or neogtiation."  - Like the people onstage are having a conversation between them but they are speaking to each other through the audience making them have the same thought pattern as the people onstage, making them more connected together.
"We don't walk onto the stage and say anything can happen! We like to put on a set of fixed points and framework in place. But within those parameters there is no desire to control or consolidate every moment - there's a freedom for the performers, to respond to each other, to follow instincts and to listen to each other. Keeping this level of fluidity and space for invention seems really important." - A key quote from Etchells in my opinion as it points out the basic ideas behind his work and if we take this into consideration then we will be following the true idea of what Etchells wanted this piece to be like.
"The desire is to make a space in which the audience has a lot of pleasurable work to do in imagining and making connections and making their own stories" - This is what we want to see when we're doing the carousel exercise. We, as the audience, want to be making stories just by looking at the people being themselves onstage.

Wednesday

We decided to use some of our Wednesday lesson to have a go at everyone's carousel ideas before we get multiple groups of people of varying degrees of drama experience, to see how we worked with the stimulus' and our ideas.

The list of missions that we used were:

-Make eye contact with every person in the group
-Move every chair as much as you can
- Sit on every chair
- Make a paper airplane
- Steal the paper airplane
- Call Chipp or Starbuck if they come in the room
-Cough every time someone sits down
-Try and untie someone else's shoe laces
- Try and touch everybody's shoulder with your nose.

An improvement that we got was to not introduce too much at the start about the idea behind it as it might alter how the younger years approach the idea of the missions and we want to see how they would naturally react to the introduction of the missions and if their focus shifts. So we changed it so that we explained the activity at the end and explained the style of our play at the end to try and see whether they understood it a bit more.


Time Lapse of our activity.

https://youtu.be/hLTaMkVMI_Y

We found that the older students understood the experiment much more than the younger ones which was what we expected as it was very hard for the younger ones to grasp that they were being influenced by the other people around them and not really focusing on themselves whereas the older students were and some of them were even concentrating to much and created a character for themselves which we reiterated was interesting to see but not what we would want in our play.

After this we went over our plan for next week so that we could change anything if we needed.

We decided that setting estimate times would help us keep on track and get each week completed and not have anything that would take longer than needed.

Week 4: TIE (Storms)

Putting the opening together

After developing our research about how men communicate over the weekend, we started by formulating a list of the main points that we found and we came up with:

• Men convert one feeling to another because they are considered feminine feelings
• Men find it hard to think and feel at the same time.
• Men feel pressured to take charge and not show insecurities
• Men view purposes of conversation differently.
• Men externalise their feelings - showing emotion through aggression.
• Men feel like they can only express their feelings through anger.

We then linked our list to suicide and our TIE intention which is to highlight the ways that men communicate or don't communicate and what that could lead to.

Expressing their emotions through anger - If this method doesn't work, for women the next step would be to find help but for men, they would be embarrassed that they were unable to find an outlet that allows them to express their feelings and so would turn to suicide. Our main question then became what if it's that men don't even recognise what they feel because the stereotypical feelings that they know they can/think they are only allowed to talk about are aggression and erotic. But if you are only talking about things that make you recognise those emotions then how can they know what they are feeling. They might presume that they can't/don't have any other feelings than those. When they can't think rationally about something would they think that the only way out is suicide? Would they think that their emotions are broken and they have this "sense" that they can't identify which keeps building and building until it becomes so overwhelming that they don't want to keep living with a "sense" that they can't register?

Approaching conversations differently - Men don't want to approach a conversation that doesn't have an end point. If men can't find a path that will allow them to find an answer then they won't have a conversation which increases the "sense" and draws the idea of suicide nearer.

We then decided to put all that we had learnt about how men communicate into a short starting point for our opening of TIE and we thought that the best way to start our pieces was to have quite a comedic sense so that it would allow the audience to open up more if we start off with a more relaxed atmosphere. 

First messy run through of our idea for the opening of TIE:

https://youtu.be/pS4rKiE8Y2U

Taking into consideration that this is our first run through of a possible opening, I think that it went quite well and we are already highlighting some of features that are expected of a man and I like the idea of us over-exaggerating them to show that we are acknowledging their feelings and the way that they act but also saying that when you look at it from an outside point of view then you see how it looks.
Obviously I think that we need to make sure that the lines are fluid and also I think that the speed that we are walking and putting the chairs on the stack needs to be quicker in order for the impact of Charlotte "trapping" her fingers to be bigger so that the audience stay engaged with piece. And I also think that the contrast between our first reaction to Charlotte (shocked - the natural reaction) and the reaction after Caitlin says that men can be "insensitive to other people's distress." (Jokey, making fun of Charlotte etc.) really shows how their reaction look to women in particular.

Week 3: Director's Challenge

Discussion between Directors

I am directing in a pair for our director's challenge and we decided that the best way to dedicate what directing was done by each person was to come up with our separate setting design, lighting designs and delivery of lines and then having a meeting just before we begin directing to establish the good ideas and formulate a rehearsal plan/schedule. I have drawn and written out some of the lighting and set design that interests me and have placed them all in a folder so that it is easy to look back on. 

My starting lighting ideas included a dimmed stage and then the cast walking on from different points like through the audience, through the door that the audience entered and from the sides and I would like to experiment with the idea of footsteps. For example, when one person is walking in you can only hear their footsteps but then contrast that with a group of 2 or 3 then you instantly know there is a group of people instead of just one and I feel like this could make a very interesting moment of orientation. I think a dimmed stage would work because I think we could play around with the idea that the audience know that something is going on but they don't know what and that suspense would help add to the author's intention as he wanted to see how far we could push an audience until they lost interest and focus and this sets that idea that something is going to happen and draws the audience in to the play. Although, evidently, nothing does actually happen it sets the play up for it's purpose very well because they would be able to see that someone is moving around but they might not be able to see their faces and as each group/person enters the space, the lights get brighter until everybody is on stage and the delivery of the first line lights the whole stage. Also if we have the cast members actually turning on some of the lights then the audience will be able to see the mechanics of the play and it will reiterate the fact that the audience are watching a play which adds to the Forced Entertainment style. We could also add in the element of costume to add to this idea as if we have the audience in their normal clothes but everyone is slightly different then we can have them take off their jackets like they are just coming in to perform. We could have the risk of the audience not knowing whether the actors are meant to be on stage or whether they are there by accident but again we could use this to our advantage.

We had a small meeting during the week about cutting down the script and discussing ideas for costume. We calculated the lowest cast number that we could have would be able to produce this with and we said 6 and we were later in formed that this would probably be the cast size that we would have and so we started cutting down the script and reassigning lines to other characters. We said that something could be easily gotten rid of but the only trouble we found was equally distributing the lines so that we didn't have some people saying a lot and others not saying anything. We realised that we would need actors who felt confident in learning lines and would be able to keep up with the pace of the piece as it is very fast to keep the audience guessing at what is going to happen next.

We put down some basic costume ideas that we would ideally want but then we also need to take into account what the actual cast want to wear as we want the element of them being comfortable on stage and being themselves without a character. We might need to add in something that make each person different for example we wrote down things like eyeliner and no shoes, just to add in a little element of difference between the cast on stage. Originally we wanted to have lots of little things going on, in different places on stage like someone making paper airplanes, someone winding a rope round a bar etc but then we realised that this is going to distract the audience and take away from the author's intention but we could add in some simple, unrelated movements like some of the paired frantic lifts that we have previously learnt, because that simple movement, juxtaposes with nothing happening onstage and would become so much more interesting to an audience who are watching and reflecting on the audience as a whole. 

Also from reading the back of the script where Etchells made his own notes on the play, he says "One way of thinking about theatre is to focus on the limited number of things in the space...and once the performance is rooted in the room...it then begins to go on excursions to other places...before we come crashing back down into the room. Several of our shows have followed similar principles. Think about Status Update in terms of a description of the world." I think that from this we can infer that this would be a good starting point for the cast to get to grips with the play and also could be a key element to our piece. 

Week 3: TIE (Storms)

Researching SToRMS

We started off the lesson discussing the aim of our TIE piece and we found out that a company called Storm DMC wanted us to do our piece about the way boys communicate or don't communicate and the problems that boys feel when they don't communicate. I researched the company and I found their website. http://stormsdmc.org/ I was reading through the information about them and they said that they are "a small organisation based in Sheffield, South Yorkshire and set up in July 2015. It is a fund within the South Yorkshire Community Foundation, a registered charity whose goal is to improve the lives of local people. Storms was set up in memory of Dan McAllister who unexpectedly took his own life in May 2015 aged nineteen." Storm stands for "Strategies to Reduce Male Suicide".

We also learnt that our age range was Y10-Y11 boys which means they are 15/16.  We agreed that we need to point out that there are certain male stereotypes that aren't healthy and talking about your problems or even just expressing how you feel in whatever way you can is important, as is acknowledging that other people might be feeling the same way or worse and there are problems that not communicating can arise. Our target audience is very close to our age and we discussed that it will be very difficult to approach as we are a whole cast of girls and so we don't actually know what it's like to not communicate and the stereotypes/expectations that there are for boys. We know of them just not what it feels like to have those placed over you since a young age. We could actually use this to our advantage and make a joke out of it especially if we establish that at an early stage because we think that boys of this age have quite a jokey nature but we then have the risk of taking a joke to far and if we have such a light feel to the piece then they won't take any of the things that we are talking about seriously and we need them to because it's about them and their lifestyle. We established that we need to do some research on the different ways that boys communicate or their lack of communication. 

I found this website that highlights the ways that men and women communicate differently and I found it very interesting.

https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2012/04/01/6-ways-men-and-women-communicate-differently/

It highlighted the ways that men's minds view things completely different to women and men's minds are always looking for a problem that needs to be solved so they use communicate to find out what the root of the problem is as soon as possible so they can deal with the aftermath. Whereas women are more concerned about the emotional side of the problem. They're not saying that men don't know how to take other people's feelings into consideration, they're just making the point that the different genders have different aims and approaches to every situation. A man's is to find the problem and deal with it, a woman's is to assess the feelings of everyone in the situation and then find the problem.

So this meant that we can't have the audience thinking we are accusing them of being inconsiderate but we can't go to the extent where we are making them feel weak as they will become defensive about the topics we are discussing. The Storms website says "In 2013 male suicide accounted for 78% of all suicides, which was the biggest cause of death in men aged 20 - 45 in the UK. The silence around suicide means that this statistic goes largely unrecognised." We want to raise this awareness and allow boys/men to feel comfortable with expressing how they are without feeling like they are weak or like they have to become defensive and guarded.

Week 2: TIE (Storms)

Investigating the concept of TIE

We began our session with a discussion about the aim of TIE and we came to the conclusion that it was to educate the people watching using theatre. We are being employed for a specific purpose whereas when we are directing, our purpose is to get people to come and watch. We all decided that throughout the process of creating a TIE piece we need to consciously be linking everything we do back to the aims and the needs of the client, who gives us the purpose for our piece. We found that knowing your target audience early allows you to define the correct language that will engage the audience and also the topics that your audience age range will connect and understand more. We then linked this to a real life situation such as the contrasting topics that would engage primary school and secondary school children.

We moved on to discussing the structure which we thought could be used for the most effective piece.

We discussed what parts of the piece we thought would be at the peaks and we decided that this was the point of high intensity or humor that gives us the audience's attention and allows them to really engage and listen to what we are saying and this would also be a good point to add in information as you would have the audience's complete attention but we thought that if we tried to add in too much information at a time, we would lose the engagement of the audience.

We then discussed what dynamic asides were and how we could use them. We created a fake story that we could play around with and add dramatic asides into. We decided that there is a boss at an educational institution and there's also a lecturer who works there and is very academically qualified to teach there but he's an alcoholic. He is turning up late, his work load has gone down but it's got to the point where the institute is relieving him of his post. If we put this scene at the start of the play means the audience doesn't have a background or connection with either characters on stage but that could also be an advantage as we could play around with the disconnection of the audience to the characters. We classed the dynamic asides as shortcuts and we found that they are majority used in Shakespeare and its a moment where the character comes out of role almost and/or breaks the 4th wall. We made institutional professionals and professionals susceptible to alcoholism our target audience.

We had to really think about the language that we used for the boss as we thought that they would have worked together for years and they have seen each other at there lowest so we thought that the boss would try and break the news in the kindest way possible. Taking this into considered, we added the idea of the boss still trying to help the lecturer even though he wasn't employed in the university anymore.

After experimenting with the scene, we added in some dynamic asides like: the lecturer knowing why he was having this meeting, the boss actually stating what the reason was for sacking him, the fears of both losing the job and keeping it and then the boss' regrets about letting him go.

We found that there were some problems with adding dynamic asides in:

• Hard to keep emphasizing with the character as they break character
• Hard to tell whether the characters were in the scene or out, slight hesitancy breaks the idea of these asides.
• Hard to maintain the emotional levels and content of the scene which means the audience isn't really taking in the new information that you're trying to put out.

We did think that the asides allowed us to see the characters more and understand what they were thinking and it was almost like we were drip-feeding the subtext to the audience and keeping them interested in what was going on. Using a juxtaposing tone and energy level  has a bigger effect on the audience.

Week 2: Director's Challenge

Researching Tim Etchells

www.timetchells.com

"Artist and writer based in the UK. Leader of the world-renowned performance group, Forced Entertainment."

"Working across different media and contexts opens up new possibilities and allows me to approach the ideas that interest me by different routes, shifting my perspective on the themes and experiences I want to investigate."

I found this really interesting as he is looking at events that have happened in his life and he's picking them apart to find other ways that he could have approached them and I think that he is always aware of how his actions are affecting other people. I think that this is what he's trying to show through his theatre pieces; how your actions effect other people and if you take a step backwards and review the situation you will find the real meaning behind your actions.

www.forcedentertainment.com

"Spectacular - A lone performer takes to the stage, explaining that the show we're watching is somehow different.

Spectacular is about the now of the performance moment, the trembling edge of laughter, possibility and invention. It's about death and playing dead, about the strange contact between what they are watching and what they're being told."

I was researching other plays that Tim Etchells has created in order to understand his style and the messages that he is trying to convey.

I also researched past production's of Status Update to see how it was staged and I found a production by The Great Torrington School.

I like this layout of the different actors as we can see each one of them clearly and each one has got at least one object on their desk that reflects the type of person they are. I feel like I could use the simplicity of the staging in my piece as it's quite easy to determine who would be speaking as we could get them to move around or stand up from their desks. I know that Tim Etchells wanted the audience to focus on the message of the piece and not get emotionally attached to the characters which is why they don't have names, they are merely referenced by letters. I also found that there isn't the letter "I" as that would mean that they are referencing themselves and none of the people onstage talk about themselves, they only state facts about the people and things around them which helps back up the idea of getting the audience to think about things bigger than themselves.

I think the problem with putting this staging in our facility would be that we only have a certain number of raised seating and I think that it would be hard to see all the different actors from that audience perspective. If we were in a full sized theatre, I think this staging would be very effective but putting it in our performance area I think we would have to position some of the people, especially those at the back, onto risers or crates to lift them up into the audience's view.

I carried on researching Tim Etchells and found that he is also an artist and some of his work reflects the message he's trying to tell through his theatre work as well. This is one of his pieces of artwork that was originally written on the walls of a art exhibition, and each sentence was on a different wall so that as you walked around you read each sentence in this order.

I think that Etchells wanted everyone to understand and think that every conversation you have is the most important one as you learn something about the person you are conversing with as your talking no matter how short your conversation is. I think this is the message that Etchells wants people to take away from all of his work.

Wednesday

We started discussing the good points and the bad points about our directors last year and we discussed the different ways to approach directing and we said that if you always start with a read through of the scene that you are doing allows the cast to establish a really basic character, understand the humor (if there is any), understand the meaning of a scene and get an overall "feel" for the scene.

We then discussed what our Mesenscene is and how it would benefit us when directing. A mesenscene is the director having a full idea of what is happening in the scene they are directing. Sometimes having a defined mesenscene could be distracting as you may not take on board any other ideas that are been thrown towards you and you only want your idea to be the outcome. On the other hand, a detailed mesenscene could enable you to push your cast into ideas that they might not have thought of before.

We then had a go at staging one of the scenes of Our Country's Good, I decided to stage scene 3 which involved 4 characters and they were having a conversation about the slaves that were being brought in and it was intertwined with a conversation about bird shooting. On my first read through I thought the atmosphere was quite light-hearted despite the serious topic of the killing of slaves. Once I was given a group of people to work with I immediately got them to read through the scene together and talked about the differences between the characters and we all established the social ranking of the characters. I feel like I could have prompted more discussions about the individual characters than the group as a whole. I then asked them if they could do a read through of the scene on the actual set and gave them free range of the set and let them move where they thought. Something that I could have done to help them would be adding in some facts about the characters to help them decide where they should move to. I then added in restrictions for each character about the staging that they were allowed to move on. I think that I could have explained why I put those restrictions in place and also encouraged and praised the cast a little more to give them guidance that what they were doing was good and maybe this would have allowed me to push them a little more in the right direction.